In September 2008, Lehman Brothers –then the fourth-largest U.S. investment bank with more than $600 billion in assets – declared bankruptcy, setting off a chain reaction resulting in financial crises that spread throughout the world. Unemployment rose, the economy struggled and the U.S. government began imposing regulations on banks.

The Woodrow Wilson School will host a public panel discussion titled, “Current Policies in the Wake of the Great Recession: Are They Making it Worse or Better?” at 4:30pm on Friday, April 11, 2014, in Dodds Auditorium, Robertson Hall, on the Princeton University campus.

Panelists will include Lewis Alexander, managing director and chief U.S. economist at Nomura, the global investment bank; Nolan McCarty, the Susan Dod Brown Professor Political and Public Affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School and Chair of Princeton University’s Department of Politics; and John B. Taylor ‘68, the Mary and Robert Raymond Professor of Economics at Stanford University and the George P. Shultz Senior Fellow in Economics at the Hoover Institution. Catherine Rampell ’07, op-ed columnist for the Washington Post, will moderate the discussion.

Alexander previously served as a counselor to U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner; chief economist at Citigroup; deputy director in the Federal Reserve Board’s Division of International Finance; and chief economist of the U.S. Department of Commerce. He holds an M.Phil and Ph.D. from Yale University in economics.

McCarty is the Chair of Princeton University’s Department of Politics. His research interests include U.S. politics, democratic political institutions and political game theory. Since 2012, he has served as a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He received his Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University.

Taylor ’68 chairs the Hoover Working Group on Economic Policy and is director of Stanford’s Introductory Economics Center. His fields of expertise are monetary policy, fiscal policy and international economics. He has served as a senior economist and member on multiple presidents’ Council of Economic Advisers, and was previously a professor at the Woodrow Wilson School and Princeton University’s Economics Department. He received his Ph.D. in economics from Stanford University.

Rampell ’07 previously worked as an economics reporter for The New York Times, where her reporting appeared in the newspaper, Economix blog, and Sunday Magazine. She has appeared on NPR, MSNBC, PBS, CNBC, CBS, ABC, C-Span and the BBC.